Complete and unabridged, with 58 full-page plates by George Inness, Winslow Homer and William Merritt Chase. A naturalist for the Bronx zoo is sent after creatures that should not exist — the great auk, a transparent people in a Florida swamp, a mammoth in the north — and falls in love in every chapter. Chambers wrote it in 1904 as a comedy with the machinery of a scientific romance, and the joke is that the monsters are always less trouble than the women. The last story is the one that stops being funny. Fifty-eight plates of sea and harbor painting by Fitz Henry Lane and Winslow Homer run alongside the hunts, catching the salt light of the coasts these creatures are chased across.